Building National Electronic Medical Record Systems via the World Wide Web
- Affiliations of the authors: Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (ISK,JF); Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA (PG, PS); and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Boston, MA (CC)
- Correspondence and reprints: Isaac S. Kohane, MD, PhD, Children's Hospital Informatics Program, Children's Hospital, 300 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. e-mail: kohane{at}a1.tch.harvard.edu
Abstract
Electronic medical record systems (EMRSs) currently do not lend themselves easily to cross-institutional clinical care and research. Unique system designs coupled with a lack of standards have led to this difficulty. The authors have designed a preliminary EMRS architecture (W3-EMRS) that exploits the multiplatform, multiprotocol, client-server technology of the World Wide Web. The architecture abstracts the clinical information model and the visual presentation away from the underlying EMRS. As a result, computation upon data elements of the EMRS and their presentation are no longer tied to the underlying EMRS structures. The architecture is intended to enable implementation of programs that provide uniform access to multiple, heterogeneous legacy EMRSs. The authors have implemented an initial prototype of W3-EMRS that accesses the database of the Boston Children's Hospital Clinician's Workstation.
Footnotes
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Supported by the National Library of Medicine (U01 LM0587701) and in part by the Oracle Corporation and the Charles Hood Foundation.
